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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An anti-pornography group that claims all adult content is unhealthy is taking aim at Reddit, one of the biggest online platforms for sharing porn and sex worker resources. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), formerly Morality in Media, celebrated changes to policy that resulted in adult performers losing their incomes, taken credit for pressuring Instagram to ban Pornhub from the platform, and encouraged its followers to help them shut down sites that host legal adult content, causing real-world harm to sex workers and pushing them toward the exploitation they claim to aim to prevent. The letter, signed by 320 "anti-sexual exploitation and violence experts," according to NCOSE, accuses Reddit of not doing enough to prevent image-based sexual abuse. The letter's co-signatories don't just push for better protection against non-consensual imagery, but demand that all adult content be banned from the site. This would result in a massive purge of hundreds of subreddits, many of them run by sex workers for posting consensual, legal content. "Adopt strong policies against hardcore pornography and sexually explicit content, due to the inability for Reddit to ever sufficiently verify the age or consent of people depicted in such content," the letter urges Reddit. It also demands that the platform "ban users who upload sexually explicit material, especially if the material depicts child sexual abuse material or non-consensually shared intimate images, and prevent them from creating another account." "While these are steps forward, Reddit's failure to enact meaningful age and consent verirication[sic] practices and ineffective moderation strategy continues to allow such content to flourish on its platform," the letter states. "If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it's not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they'll just nuke porn out of convenience," a moderator for r/cumsluts, a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. "Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It's just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I'm very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic." A moderator for r/18_19 told Motherboard that they don't expect Reddit to ban adult content anytime soon, but if it did, that it could push people to decentralized platforms, or platforms that are more difficult to moderate or search. "I don't think Reddit should ban porn or adult communities. In the short term, banning adult content would suck," they said. "A huge number of people come here for that. But it wouldn't be a big deal in the long run. Porn will be available, it would just take a while for it to consolidate around new locations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water vapor around a distant rocky planet located 26 light-years away. "The water vapor could indicate the presence of an atmosphere around the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, a discovery that could be important for our search for habitable worlds outside the solar system," reports Space.com. "However, the scientists behind the discovery caution that this water vapor could be coming from the world's host star rather than the planet itself." From the report: The exoplanet, designated GJ 486 b, orbits a red dwarf star located 26 light-years away in the Virgo constellation. Although it has three times the mass of Earth, it is less than a third the size of our planet. GJ 486 b takes less than 1.5 Earth days to orbit its star and is probably tidally locked to the red dwarf, meaning it perpetually shows the same face to its star. Red dwarfs like the parent star of GJ 486 b are the most common form of stars in the cosmos, meaning that statistically speaking, rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a stellar object. Red dwarf stars are also cooler than other types of stars, meaning that a planet must orbit them tightly to remain warm enough to host liquid water, a vital element needed for life. But, red dwarfs also emit violent and powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation when they are young that would blast away the atmospheres of planets that are too close, potentially making those exoplanets very inhospitable to life. That means astronomers are currently keen to discover if a rocky planet in such a harsh environment could manage to both form an atmosphere and then hang on to it long enough for life to take hold, a process that took around a billion years on Earth. [...] Even though GJ 486 b's host star is cooler than the sun, water vapor could still concentrate in starspots. If that is the case, this could create a signal that mimics a planetary atmosphere. If there is an atmosphere around GJ 486 b, then radiation from its red dwarf parent star will constantly erode it, meaning it has to be replenished by steam from the exoplanet's interior ejected by volcanic activity. The research appears in a paper on arXiv while it awaits publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read more about it via NASA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new web portal allows "Star Trek" fans to explore the iconic bridge of the starship Enterprise through 360-degree, 3D models and learn about its evolution throughout the franchise's history. Smithsonian Magazine reports: The site features 360-degree, 3D models of the various versions of the Enterprise, as well as a timeline of the ship's evolution throughout the franchise's history. Fans of the show can also read detailed information about each version of the ship's design, its significance to the "Star Trek" storyline and its production backstory. Developed in honor of the "Star Trek: Picard" series finale, which dropped late last month on Paramount+, the portal is a collaboration between the Roddenberry Estate, the Roddenberry Archive and the technology company OTOY. A group of well-known "Star Trek" artists -- including Denise and Michael Okuda, Daren Dochterman, Doug Drexler and Dave Blass -- also supported the project. The voice of the late actress Majel Roddenberry, who played the Enterprise's computer for years, will be added to the site in the future. Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, followed by Majel Roddenberry in 2008; the two had been married since 1969. The portal's creators also released a short video, narrated by actor John de Lancie, exploring every version of the Enterprise's bridge to date, "from its inception in Pato Guzman's 1964 sketches, through its portrayal across decades of TV shows and feature films, to its latest incarnation on the Enterprise-G, as revealed in the final episode of 'Star Trek: Picard,'" per the video description. Accompanying video interviews with "Star Trek" cast and crew -- including William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the original series, and Terry Matalas, a showrunner for "Star Trek: Picard" -- also explore the series' legacy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: A sprawling online company based in Georgia that has made tens of millions of dollars purporting to sell access to jobs at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has exposed its internal IT operations and database of nearly 900,000 customers. The leaked records indicate the network's chief technology officer in Pakistan has been hacked for the past year, and that the entire operation was created by the principals of a Tennessee-based telemarketing firm that has promoted USPS employment websites since 2016. KrebsOnSecurity was recently contacted by a security researcher who said he found a huge tranche of full credit card records exposed online, and that at first glance the domain names involved appeared to be affiliated with the USPS. Further investigation revealed a long-running international operation that has been emailing and text messaging people for years to sign up at a slew of websites that all promise they can help visitors secure employment at the USPS. Sites like FederalJobsCenter[.]com also show up prominently in Google search results for USPS employment, and steer applicants toward making credit card "registration deposits" to ensure that one's application for employment is reviewed. These sites also sell training, supposedly to help ace an interview with USPS human resources. FederalJobsCenter's website is full of content that makes it appear the site is affiliated with the USPS, although its "terms and conditions" state that it is not. Rather, the terms state that FederalJobsCenter is affiliated with an entity called US Job Services, which says it is based in Lawrenceville, Ga. The site says applicants need to make a credit card deposit to register, and that this amount is refundable if the applicant is not offered a USPS job within 30 days after the interview process. But a review of the public feedback on US Job Services and dozens of similar names connected to this entity over the years shows a pattern of activity: Applicants pay between $39.99 and $100 for USPS job coaching services, and receive little if anything in return. Some reported being charged the same amount monthly. Michael Martel, spokesperson for the United States Postal Inspection Service, said in a written statement that the USPS has no affiliation with the websites or companies named in this story. "To learn more about employment with USPS, visit USPS.com/careers," Martel wrote. "If you are the victim of a crime online report it to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov. To report fraud committed through or toward the USPS, its employees, or customers, report it to the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) at www.uspis.gov/report." A list of all the current sites selling this product can be found in Krebs' report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The co-founders of Google DeepMind and LinkedIn have launched an AI chatbot called Pi (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), which aims to provide relaxed and supportive conversations rather than information or specific tasks, distinguishing itself by encouraging dialogue and inquiry from users. The Financial Times reports: The first product from the year-old AI start-up behind Pi, Inflection AI, comes as the growing hype around generative AI drives a surge of investor and consumer interest. Users of Pi can have personal conversations with the chatbot, either directly via an app, or through text, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Inflection AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman described the chatbot as having the persona of a sympathetic sounding board, rather than trying to provide information. The product, which has been beta-tested by users for several months, has a narrow use case, which makes it safer and easier to control, Suleyman said. "There's lots of things Pi cannot do. It doesn't do lists, or coding, it doesn't do travel plans, it won't write your marketing strategy, or your essay for school," Suleyman said in an interview with the Financial Times. "It's purely designed for relaxed, supportive, informative conversation." Eventually, the personal AI tool would also provide assistance such as helping users perform online tasks, but was currently more for "mundane, trivial and banal" conversations, according to Suleyman. In a live demo of the chatbot, Pi appeared distinct from others such as ChatGPT or Bard in that it often ended its responses with a question for the user, encouraging dialogue. "That's what Pi does really well, it helps facilitate your own line of inquiry," Suleyman said. However, it does not provide citations or references, although Suleyman said that will change. It also sometimes fabricates facts, as is the case with all large language models -- the technology underlying the new generation of chatbots, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, Colorado eliminated a 2005 law that required local governments to hold an election before offering cable television or telecommunications service, "a process that pitted city and town leaders against well-funded broadband industry lobbying campaigns," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed a bill to eliminate that law yesterday. The bill had been approved by the State House in a 48-14 vote and in the Senate by a 31-4 vote. Both chambers have Democratic majorities, but the votes didn't go entirely along party lines; all of the "no" votes came from Republicans, but other Republicans joined Democrats in approving the bill. The bill signed by Polis "gives local governments the authority to provide broadband service, either on their own or by partnering with industry service providers, without holding a local election," the Governor's Office of Information Technology said. "Each local government is in a unique position or different phase of connecting residents to high-speed Internet, and this bill allows them to establish broadband plans that meet the needs of their communities," Colorado Broadband Office Executive Director Brandy Reitter said. Going forward, cities and towns won't have to hold elections to opt out of the 2005 restriction on municipal broadband. A vote to opt out of the state law didn't guarantee that a city or town would build a network, but the vote was a necessary step and in some cases resulted in a municipal broadband service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes went viral late last month when she invited her fans to create music using her voice, stating that should would split 50% of royalties for any successful AI-generated song. Now, the artist has unveiled an AI voice software, called Elf.Tech, to make it even easier for users to deepfake her voice for their own AI songs. Pitchfork reports: Artists can commercially release the results in exchange for half of any master-recording royalties. Grimes announced a pair of new songs, "Music for Machines" and "I Wanna Be Software," in tandem with the launch, though their release date has not been set. In a Twitter thread about the software, Grimes asked users to "be tasteful" but said she would only block extreme uses, such as an AI Grimes "Nazi anthem" ("unless it's somehow in jest a la The Producers I guess"). "Baby murder songs" are also off the menu. Through Elf.Tech, Grimes has also shared a demo of her collaborative remake of Richie Hawtin's Plastikman track "Passage (Out)." Find it in the "Bounces" folder on the website. You can also access stems to train your own Grimes AI. The project is powered by the generative AI Triniti.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Microsoft issued a Windows update that broke a Chrome feature, making it harder to change your default browser and annoying Chrome users with popups, Gizmodo has learned. An April Windows update borked a new button in Chrome -- the most popular browser in the world -- that let you change your default browser with a single click, but the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient. This petty chapter of the browser wars started in July 2022 when Google quietly rolled out a new button in Chrome for Windows. It would show up near the top of the screen and let you change your default browser in one click without pulling up your system settings. For eight months, it worked great. Then, in April, Microsoft issued Windows update KB5025221, and things got interesting. "Every time I open Chrome the default app settings of Windows will open. I've tried many ways to resolve this without luck," one IT administrator said on a Microsoft forum. A Reddit user noticed that the settings page also popped up any and every time you clicked on a link, but only if Chrome was your default browser. "It doesn't happen if we change the default browser to Edge," the user said. Others made similar complaints on Google support forums, some saying that entire organizations were having the issue. Users quickly realized the culprit was the operating system update. For people on the regular consumer version of Windows, things weren't quite as bad; the one-click "Make Default" button just stopped working. Gizmodo was able to replicate the problem. In fact, we were able to circumvent the issue just by changing the name of the Chrome app on a Windows desktop. It seems that Microsoft threw up the roadblock specifically for Chrome, the main competitor to its Edge browser. [...] In response, Google had to disable its one-click default button; the issue stopped after it did. In other words, Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to break a Chrome feature that made life easier for users. Google confirmed the details of this story, but declined to comment further.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Vice Media Group appears to be the latest digital media company in trouble," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "The New York Times reports that the company is preparing for bankruptcy after being unable to find a buyer. Vice canceled Vice News Tonight only four days ago. The company, once valued at over $5.7 billion, has been bleeding cash, and major investors such as Disney will take a huge loss." From the report: In the event of a bankruptcy, Vice's largest debt holder, Fortress Investment Group, could end up controlling the company, said one of the people. Vice would continue operating normally and run an auction to sell the company over a 45-day period, with Fortress in pole position as the most likely acquirer. Unlike Vice's other investors, which have included Disney and Fox, Fortress holds senior debt, which means it gets paid out first in the event of a sale. Disney, which has already written down its investments, is not getting a return, the person said. Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal more than two decades ago. Over the years, it blossomed into a global media company with a movie studio, an ad agency, a glossy show on HBO and bureaus in far-flung world capitals. Disney, after investing hundreds of millions in Vice, explored buying the company in 2015 for more than $3 billion, according to the two people familiar with the conversations. "Vice Media Group has been engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of strategic alternatives and planning," Vice said in a statement on Monday. "The company, its board and stakeholders continue to be focused on finding the best path for the company."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung told CNBC that it is temporarily restricting the use of generative AI for employees after the company discovered such services were being misused. From the report: Employees of one of Samsung's biggest divisions were informed of the move in a memo at the end of April after there had been cases of misuse of the technology. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that some staff had uploaded sensitive code to ChatGPT. Samsung does not have its own generative AI product yet. ChatGPT is developed by U.S. firm OpenAI which is backed by Microsoft while other generative AI products include Google's Bard. Inputting sensitive company data into these foreign-owned services could be a concern to companies worried about leaks of crucial information. Samsung told employees to take precautions when using ChatGPT and other products outside of work and advised workers not to enter any personal or company related information into the services. [...] Despite the latest restrictions, Samsung is looking for ways in which generative AI could be used safely to enhance employee productivity and efficiency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The New York Police Department (NYPD) and New York City's self-proclaimed computer geek of a mayor are urging resident car owners to equip their vehicles with an Apple AirTag. During a press conference on Sunday, Mayor Eric Adams announced the distribution of 500 free AirTags to New Yorkers, saying the technology would aid in reducing the city's surging car theft numbers. Adams held the press conference at the 43rd precinct in the Bronx, where he said there had been 200 instances of grand larceny of autos. An NYPD official said that in New York City, 966 Hyundais and Kias have been stolen this year thus far, already surpassing 2022's 819 total. The NYPD's public crime statistics tracker says there have been 4,492 vehicle thefts this year, a 13.3 percent increase compared to the same period last year and the largest increase among NYC's seven major crime categories. Adams, as the city did when announcing litigation against Kia and Hyundai on April 7, largely blamed the rise in car thefts on Kia and Hyundai, which he said are "leading the way" in stolen car brands. Hyundais and Kias were the subjects of the Kia Challenge TikTok trend that encouraged people to jack said vehicles with a mere USB-A cable. The topic has graduated way beyond a social media fad and into a serious concern. [...] Adams was adamant grand larceny auto numbers were dragging the city's overall crime numbers up and urged New Yorkers to "participate" in the fight against car theft by using an AirTag. NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said users who report a stolen vehicle equipped with an AirTag will see the police use "drones, our StarChase technology & good old fashion police work to safely recover your stolen car." "Help us help you, get an AirTag," he tweeted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla announced today that it has acquired Fakespot, a startup that offers a website and browser extension that helps users identify fake or unreliable reviews. From a report: The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Fakespot's offerings can be used to spot fake reviews listed on various online marketplaces including Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor and more. Founded in 2016, New York-based Fakespot uses an AI and machine learning system to detect patterns and similarities between reviews in order to flag those that are most likely to be deceptive. Fakespot provides a rating or grade for the product's reviews in order to help consumers make more informed decisions when making a purchase. The goal behind the company's website and browser extension is to give users the ability to quickly see where deceptive reviews may be artificially inflating a product's ranking in search engines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zac Bowden, reporting for WindowsCentral: Microsoft's dual-screen foldable smartphone has seemingly been abandoned. At least, that's how it looks on the outside. The last major software update the Surface Duo received was in October 2022, when the company delivered Android 12L. Since then, movement on new features and bug fixes has pretty much ground to a halt. A major OS update often comes with a couple of months of bug fixing afterward to iron out any new issues that may have popped up with all the new changes that a major OS release brings. That's not the case with Android 12L on the Surface Duo. Microsoft pushed out this update and has fixed just one bug since. Android 12L for Surface Duo was not a perfect release, and it did introduce new issues users assumed would be fixed in due course, but that hasn't happened. The company has continued to release Android security updates, but the changelogs for these monthly updates make no mention of general OS fixes or improvements, which implies Microsoft is doing the bare minimum for these releases. Even then, the bare minimum clearly wasn't enough in April, as the Surface Duo failed to receive the April 2023 security update, marking the first time since the device launched that Microsoft has failed to issue an up-to-date security patch for the device. And it's not just the OS that's being neglected, Microsoft's own Android app teams seem to have abandoned the Surface Duo too. SwiftKey just recently got updated with Bing AI capabilities, which is awesome and it works across a wide range of Android smartphones, including the latest Samsung devices. But the feature is not available on Surface Duo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday celebrated the 30th anniversary of releasing the World Wide Web into the public domain. From a report: As the World Wide Web Consortium's brief history of the web explains, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee - then a fellow at CERN - proposed that the organization adopt "a global hypertext system." His first name for the project was "Mesh." And as the Consortium records, in 1990 Berners-Lee set to work on "a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up 'WorldWideWeb' as a name for the program." Berners-Lee's work gathered a very appreciative audience inside CERN, and soon started to attract attention elsewhere. By January 1993, the world had around 50 HTTP servers. The following month, the first graphical browser -- Marc Andreessen's Mosaic -- appeared. Alternative hypertext tools, like Gopher, started to lose their luster. On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web -- a client, server, and library of code created under its roof -- belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile on Monday said it experienced a hack that exposed account PINs and other customer data in the company's second network intrusion this year and the ninth since 2018. From a report: The intrusion, which started on February 24 and lasted until March 30, affected 836 customers, according to a notification on the website of Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey. "The information obtained for each customer varied but may have included full name, contact information, account number and associated phone numbers, T-Mobile account PIN, social security number, government ID, date of birth, balance due, internal codes that T-Mobile uses to service customer accounts (for example, rate plan and feature codes), and the number of lines," the company wrote in a letter sent to affected customers. Account PINs, which customers use to swap out SIM cards and authorize other important changes to their accounts, were reset once T-Mobile discovered the breach on March 27. The incident is the second hack to hit T-Mobile this year. It's the ninth since 2018, based on reporting by TechCrunch. In January, T-Mobile said "bad actors" abused its application programming in a way that allowed them to access the data of 37 million customers. The hack started on November 25, 2022, and wasn't discovered by T-Mobile until January 5, TechCrunch said. Data obtained in that incident included names, billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, T-Mobile account numbers, and information such as the number of lines on accounts and plan features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple and Google said on Tuesday that they were working together to prevent lost item trackers like Apple's AirTag from being used to track people without their permission. From a report: The companies came together to draft a new industry standard that will add the ability to alert victims to unwanted trackers in Android and iOS, the companies said. Apple's AirTag is intended to help people find lost items such as keys by displaying an item's nearly real-time location inside an iPhone app. But there have been many reports about the $30 coin-sized device being used to stalk people since it went on sale in 2021. In response, Apple previously built detection features into iPhones that allow users to detect unfamiliar AirTags in the user's area. Tuesday's announcement suggests that Android phones will also soon gain the ability to warn their users if they are being tracked by an AirTag.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Not everyone trusts OpenAI's ChatGPT. While the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot has proved popular with some businesses looking to automate business tasks, other companies, such as banks, have avoided adopting ChatGPT for fear that their employees would inadvertently give the chatbot proprietary information when they use it. Microsoft, which has the rights to resell the startup's technology, has a plan to win over the holdouts. Later this quarter Microsoft's Azure cloud server unit plans to sell a version of ChatGPT that runs on dedicated cloud servers where the data will be kept separate from those of other customers, according to two people with knowledge of the upcoming announcement. The idea is to give customers peace of mind that their secrets won't leak to the main ChatGPT system, the people said. But it will come at a price: The product could cost as much as 10 times what customers currently pay to use the regular version of ChatGPT, one of these people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material. From a report: The removal makes "a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education," says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials. The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India's 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a "content rationalization" process. NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If it looks like a book, feels like a book and stacks like a book, then there's still a good chance it may not be a book. From a report: Fake books come in several different forms: once-real books that are hollowed out, fabric backdrops with images of books printed onto them, empty boxlike objects with faux titles and authors or sometimes just a facade of spines along a bookshelf. Already the norm for film sets and commercial spaces, fake books are becoming popular fixtures in homes. While some people are going all in and covering entire walls in fake books, others are aghast at the thought that someone would think to decorate with a book that isn't real. "I will never use fake books," said Jeanie Engelbach, an interior designer and organizer in New York City. "It just registers as pretentious, and it creates the illusion that you are either better read or smarter than you really are." Ms. Engelbach said she has frequently used books as decor, at times styling clients' bookcases with aesthetics taking priority over function, which is a typical interior-design practice. At Books by the Foot -- a company that sells, as its name suggests, books by the foot -- one can purchase books by color (options include "luscious creams," "vintage cabernet" and "rainbow ombre"), by subject ("well-read art" or "gardening"), wrapped books (covered in linen or rose gold) and more. The tomes are all "rescue books," ones that would otherwise be discarded or recycled for paper pulp, said Charles Roberts, the president of Books by the Foot's parent company, Wonder Book. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, remote work created increased demand for the company's services. While it mostly specializes in the sale of real books, the company has also dabbled in the world of faux ones. The book seller has cut books -- so only the spines remain -- and glued them to shelves for cruise ships,"where they don't want to have a lot of weight or worry that the books will fall off the shelves if the weather gets bad," Mr. Roberts said. There are other, sometimes counterintuitive, uses for fake tomes as well. Although it has the capacity to hold more than 1.35 million of them, many of the books in China's 360,000-square-foot Tianjin Binhai Library aren't real. Instead, perforated aluminum plates emblazoned with images of books can be found, primarily on the upper shelves of the atrium. While the presence of artificial books in a place devoted to reading has been widely criticized -- "more fiction than books," one headline mocked -- it remains a buzzy tourist attraction. After all, the books don't need to be real if it's just for the 'gram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's the cost of students using ChatGPT for homework? For U.S. education services provider Chegg, it could be nearly $1 billion in market valuation. From a report: Chegg signaled the rising popularity of viral chatbot ChatGPT was pressuring its subscriber growth and prompted it to suspend its full-year outlook, sending shares of the company 47% lower in early trading on Tuesday. "Since March, we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it's having an impact on our new customer growth rate," said Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig. There are fears Chegg's core business could become extinct as consumers experiment with free artificial intelligence (AI) tools, said analyst Brent Thill at Jefferies, which downgraded the stock to "hold." Last month, the Santa Clara, California-based firm said it would launch ChatGPT's AI powered CheggMate, a study aide tailored to students' needs, at a time educators were grappling with the consequences of the homework drafting chatbot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to a new law that requires porn sites to verify users' ages, Pornhub has completely disabled its websites for people located in Utah. From a report: As of today, anyone accessing Pornhub from a Utah-based IP address doesn't see the Pornhub homepage, but instead is met with a video of Cherie DeVille, adult performer and member of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, explaining that they won't be able to visit the site. "As you may know, your elected officials in Utah are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website," DeVille says. "While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is officially entering the crypto perps market. From a report: The firm, which has made headlines in recent weeks for its brouhahas with U.S. regulators and its plans to set up shop overseas, said Tuesday that it would enable international users to trade so-called perpetual futures out of Bermuda through a new platform. Dubbed Coinbase International Exchange, the platform touts a robust trading experience delivered in partnership with a number of external market makers ready to provide liquidity, as well as a liquidation framework that "meets rigorous compliance standards," according to marketing materials shared with The Block.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Writers Guild of America, the union that bargains on behalf of Hollywood's screenwriters, has called a strike after negotiations with major studios failed to produce a favorable contract this week. From a report: The strike, which is the first involving WGA to occur in 15 years, seeks to bring firms to the table on a host of issues, including higher pay and better working conditions. But some of the issues are quite unique in the annals of modern labor disputes and have to do with technological changes currently disrupting the entertainment industry -- such as the role artificial intelligence may play in future screenwriting projects. "Though our Negotiating Committee began this process intent on making a fair deal, the studios' responses have been wholly insufficient given the existential crisis writers are facing," the WGA tweeted late Monday evening. "Picketing will begin Tuesday afternoon." Negotiations between WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers -- the trade organization that represents the movie and streaming studios in contract negotiations -- have been ongoing for the past month but the deadline for a new contract was midnight on Tuesday morning. In its own statement, the AMPTP claimed that it had presented a "comprehensive package proposal" to the Guild and that it had been willing to "improve that offer" but claimed that the "magnitude of other proposals" that the union had made were untenable. "The AMPTP member companies remain united in their desire to reach a deal that is mutually beneficial to writers and the health and longevity of the industry," said the organization, which represents the likes of Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon, Sony and other entertainment giants. The New York Times adds: The dispute has pitted 11,500 screenwriters against the major studios, including old guard entertainment companies like Universal and Paramount as well as tech industry newcomers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When you think of digital entertainment, your mind might turn first to online video-streaming services, such as Sling TV or YouTube TV, and video-on-demand services, including Netflix or Acorn TV. However, consultant Deloitte's 17th annual "Digital Media Trends" survey suggests traditional television shows and movies are no longer the only forms of entertainment. Younger generations, often called Gen Zs and Millennials, are increasingly turning to user-generated content (UGC) -- which relies on unpaid contributors rather than traditional media professionals -- and video games to find personal fulfillment, value, and meaning. These younger users are creating a vibrant, immersive, and social tapestry of experiences with UGC, video games, music, and social media all playing significant roles. And that move towards UGC and gaming could have big implications for everyone. Deloitte's survey found that about a third (32%) of consumers view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions, with that proportion increasing to 50% among Gen Zs and Millennials. Almost half (48%) of these younger generations engage more with others on social media than in the physical world, and 40% of them socialize more in video games than offline. Of course, it's not only younger people who view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions. [...] Yet those born after 1981, the usual dividing line between Generation X and Millennials, are much more inclined to live their lives online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, the company may drop its iconic "i" CPU branding and add a new moniker. Chipzilla today told The Register "We are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks." From the report: The Register asked Intel about branding after semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel on Monday tweeted "Imagine you're losing market share when you've been monopoly for decades, and your bright idea is to burn all brand recognition to the ground!" "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!" Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme." Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota report via Phys.Org: Biocomputing is typically done either with live cells or with non-living, enzyme-free molecules. Live cells can feed themselves and can heal, but it can be difficult to redirect cells from their ordinary functions toward computation. Non-living molecules solve some of the problems of live cells, but have weak output signals and are difficult to fine-tune and regulate. In new research published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has developed a platform for a third method of biocomputing: Trumpet, or Transcriptional RNA Universal Multi-Purpose GatE PlaTform. Trumpet uses biological enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing. Researchers performed logic gate operations, similar to operations done by all computers, in test tubes using DNA molecules. A positive gate connection resulted in a phosphorescent glow. The DNA creates a circuit, and a fluorescent RNA compound lights up when the circuit is completed, just like a lightbulb when a circuit board is tested. The research team demonstrated that:- The Trumpet platform has the simplicity of molecular biocomputing with added signal amplification and programmability.- The platform is reliable for encoding all universal Boolean logic gates (NAND, NOT, NOR, AND, and OR), which are fundamental to programming languages.- The logic gates can be stacked to build more complex circuits. The team also developed a web-based tool facilitating the design of sequences for the Trumpet platform. "Trumpet is a non-living molecular platform, so we don't have most of the problems of live cell engineering," said co-author Kate Adamala, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. "We don't have to overcome evolutionary limitations against forcing cells to do things they don't want to do. This also gives Trumpet more stability and reliability, with our logic gates avoiding the leakage problems of live cell operations." "It could make a lot of long-term neural implants possible. The applications could range from strictly medical, like healing damaged nerve connections or controlling prosthetics, to more sci-fi applications like entertainment or learning and augmented memory," added Adamala.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Some recall bright lights at the end of a tunnel, feeling the presence of loved ones or floating above their body after a near-death experience. Now, scientists say they have captured "conscious-like" brain activity in dying patients in findings that give new insights into the process of death. The study used data from four patients who had died in hospital while their brains were being monitored using EEG recordings because they had previously suffered suspected seizures. All four of the patients were comatose and unresponsive and had been deemed beyond medical help. With their families' permission, life support had been withdrawn and they had subsequently suffered cardiac arrest and died. The scientists retrospectively analyzed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients' deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies. The other two patients did not display the same increase in heart rate or brain activity, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists said it was impossible to know exactly what the brain activity might correspond to as a subjective experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign dating back to 2014, soldiers in Ukraine are now using Steam Decks to remotely operate a high-caliber machine gun turret. The weapon is called the "Sabre" and is unique to Ukraine. Motherboard reports: Ukrainian news outlet TPO Media recently reported on the deployment of a new model of the Sabre on its Facebook page. Photos and videos of the system show soldiers operating a Steam Deck connected to a large machine gun via a heavy piece of cable. According to the TPO Media post, the Sabre system allows soldiers to fight the enemy from a great distance and can handle a range of calibers, from light machine guns firing anti-tank rounds to an AK-47. In the TPO footage, the Sabre is firing what appears to be a PKT belt-fed machine gun. The PKT is a heavy barrelled machine that doesn't have a stock and is typically mounted on vehicles like armored personnel carriers. It uses a solenoid trigger so it can be fired remotely, which is the cable running out of the back of the gun and into the complex of metal and wires on the side of the turret. The Sabre system wasn't always controlled with a Steam Deck [...]. The first instances of the weapon appeared in 2014. The U.S. and the rest of NATO is giving Ukraine a lot of money for defense now, but that wasn't the case when Russia first invaded in 2014. To fill its funding gaps, Ukrainians ran a variety of crowdfunding campaigns. Over the years, Ukraine has used crowdfunding to pay for everything from drones to hospitals. One of the most popular websites is The People's Project, and it's there that the Sabre was born. The People's Project launched the crowdfunding campaign for Sabre in 2015 and collected more than $12,000 for the project over the next two years. It's initial goal was to deploy 10 of these systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A GitHub project called GPT4free has received a letter from OpenAI demanding that the repo be shut down within five days or face a lawsuit. Tom's Hardware reports: Anyone can use ChatGPT for free, but if you want to use GPT4, the latest language model, you have to either pay for ChatGPT Plus, pay for access to OpenAI's API, or find another site that has incorporated GPT4 into its own free chatbot. There are sites that use OpenAI such as Forefront and You.com, but what if you want to make your own bot and don't want to pay for the API? A GitHub project called GPT4free allows you to get free access to the GPT4 and GPT3.5 models by funneling those queries through sites like You.com, Quora and CoCalc and giving you back the answers. The project is GitHub's most popular new repo, getting 14,000 stars this week. Now, according to Xtekky, the European computer science student who runs the repo, OpenAI has sent a letter demanding that he take the whole thing down within five days or face a lawsuit. I interviewed Xtekky via Telegram, and he said he doesn't think OpenAI should be targeting him since he isn't connecting directly to the company's API, but is instead getting data from other sites that are paying for their own API licenses. If the owners of those sites have a problem with his scripts querying them, they should approach him directly, he posited. [...] Even if the original repo is taken down, there's a great chance that the code -- and this method of accessing GPT4 and GPT3.5 -- will be published elsewhere by members of the community. Even if GPT4Free had never existed anyone can find ways to use these sites' APIs if they continue to be unsecured. "Users are sharing and hosting this project everywhere," he said. "Deletion of my repo will be insignificant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an effort to appeal to indie authors, Spotify's Findaway audiobook seller "will no longer take a 20 percent cut of royalties for titles sold on its DIY Voices platform -- so long as the sales are made on Spotify," reports The Verge. From the report: In a company blog post published on Monday, Findaway said that it would "pass on cost-saving efficiencies" from its integration with the streaming service. While it's free for authors to upload their audiobooks onto Findaway's Voices platform, the company normally uses an 80/20 pricing structure -- where Findaway takes a 20 percent fee on all royalties earned. But that fee comes after sales platforms take their own 50 percent cut on the list price. So under the old revenue split, an author who sold a $10 audiobook would have to give $5 to Spotify and $1 to Findaway. But moving forward, that same author will no longer have to pay the $1 distribution fee to Findaway when a sale is made through Spotify. The margins on audiobooks are exceptionally high, much to the chagrin of the authors. For example, Audible takes 75 percent of retail sales (though it'll only take 60 percent with an exclusivity contract). Many authors share royalties with their narrators and have to pay production fees -- meaning they get an even smaller share of royalties. The move by Spotify and Findaway is likely a bid to draw more indie authors from Audible, which is currently its biggest competitor. But Spotify's audiobooks business -- which it launched last fall -- still has a long way to go. Unlike music or podcasts, most audiobooks on Spotify must be purchased individually, and sales are restricted to its web version. Even CEO Daniel Ek admitted that the current process of buying an audiobook through Spotify is "pretty horrible." "We at Spotify are just at the beginning of our journey supporting independent authors -- we have many plans for how to help authors expand their reach, maximize revenue, and ultimately build a strong audiobooks business," said Audiobook's communications chief, Laura Pezzini.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog. The inspector general of the Transportation Department said in a new report that FAA officials wanted to sort out raw data about the two crashes, and held off grounding the plane despite growing international pressure. The inspector general's office said that it reviewed emails and interviewed FAA officials. The investigation "revealed that individual engineers at the Seattle (office) recommended grounding the airplane while the accident was being investigated based on what they perceived as similarities between the accidents." One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow. An FAA official said the analysis "suggested that there was a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days" if no changes were made to the planes. "However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data," the report said. FAA officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the agency's Seattle office opted not to ground the plane. "Instead, they waited for more detailed data to arrive," the watchdog said in the report, which was made public Friday. The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia and was followed by the second in March 2019 in Ethiopia. In all, 346 people died. The FAA was the last major aviation regulator to ground the Max -- three days after the second crash. The FAA did not let the planes fly again until late 2020, after Boeing altered a flight-control system that autonomously pointed the plane's nose down before both crashes. The inspector general's office said the FAA's caution on grounding the Max fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data -- an explanation that agency officials offered at the time. Still, the watchdog recommended that FAA document how key and urgent safety decisions are made and make several other changes in how it analyzes crashes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Windows Latest, Microsoft is working on new ARM chips to compete against Apple Silicon. "I have also spotted some job listings that suggest the company is building its own Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices" writes Mayank Parmar. "Additionally, I understand that Microsoft is optimizing Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture." From the report: These developments coincide with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, which has a special version optimized for silicon and designed to leverage AI capabilities. The job listings (most of them have now been taken down) describe positions related to custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, high-bandwidth designs. This suggests that Microsoft is building its own ARM-based chips, aiming to compete with Apple's M chips lineup in terms of performance and efficiency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn't a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can't look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner. But gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. This technology could help people who can't speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery. Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. "There's a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought," said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study's lead author, during a press briefing. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as "a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity." The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn't construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one's internal mental processes. [...] The model misses a lot about the stories it decodes. It struggles with grammatical features such as pronouns. It can't decipher proper nouns such as names and places, and sometimes it just gets things wrong altogether. But it achieves a high level of accuracy, compared with past methods. Between 72 and 82 percent of the time in the stories, the decoder was more accurate at decoding their meaning than would be expected from random chance. Here's an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: "i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness." The model went on to decode: "i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn't see anything and looked up again i saw nothing." The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Public transit companies in Germany say more than 3 million people have already snapped up a new ticket being launched Monday that allows them to use all local and regional trains, buses and metros across the country for 49 euros ($53.90) a month. From a report: The new Germany Ticket is intended to encourage people to ditch their cars in favor of more environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It follows on from an experimental 9-euro 'all you can ride' ticket that proved to be success last year, but which officials said wasn't financially viable. The new ticket is considered a revolution in Germany's fractured public transit system where dozens of regional companies offered myriad different fare options that baffled many travelers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. From a report: US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online. The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, but the precedent followed by US district courts only forces disclosure of anonymous users' identities "in the exceptional case where the compelling need for the discovery sought outweighs the First Amendment rights of the anonymous speaker," Beeler noted. After reviewing the facts and arguments, she found that the Reddit users' comments were irrelevant to the film studios' underlying case and that the studios could obtain relevant information from other sources. Reddit has no involvement in the underlying case, which is a copyright lawsuit in a different federal court against cable Internet service provider RCN. Bodyguard Productions, Millennium Media, and other film companies sued RCN in the US District Court in New Jersey over RCN customers' alleged downloads of 34 movies such as Hellboy, Rambo: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard. In an attempt to prove that RCN (now known as Astound Broadband) turned a blind eye to customers illegally downloading copyrighted movies, the studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. While some of the comments were posted in 2022, other comments were made in 2009 and 2014.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple promised faster turnaround times for security patches with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, and it's now delivering on that claim. From a report: The company has released its first Rapid Security Response updates for devices running iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS 13.3.1. They're available through Software Update as usual, but are small downloads that don't require much time to install. MacRumors says the fix is deploying over the course of 48 hours, so don't be surprised if you have to wait a short while.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has learned from enough games of Monopoly that it's good to be the banker as well as a player. From a report: A Monday report from Forbes based on anonymous internal sources claims users deposited close to $1 billion in just four days after Apple introduced its new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card savings account. While the company had previously seen success with its mobile payments platform, the new savings account is already doing gangbusters. After the Cupertino tech giant launched its new high yield savings account last month, the company saw $990 million in deposits in less than a week, per Forbes' sources. In that time, 240,000 accounts signed up for the service. New savings accounts cannot exceed $250,000 per the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's insurance limits. If the Forbes reporting is true, then users are depositing several thousand dollars into their new accounts, on average.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration plans to study companies' use of technology to monitor and manage workers, which it said on Monday is becoming increasingly common and can cause "serious risks to workers." From a report: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a blog post, sought comments from employees about their experience with surveillance technology, and asked employers and software vendors how they develop and use them. "While these technologies can benefit both workers and employers in some cases, they can also create serious risks to workers," the OSTP said. "Monitoring conversations can deter workers from exercising their rights to organize and collectively bargain with their employers. And, when paired with employer decisions about pay, discipline, and promotion, automated surveillance can lead to workers being treated differently or discriminated against."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. From a report:The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names like News Live 79 and Daily Business Post, while others share lifestyle tips, celebrity news or publish sponsored content. But none disclose they're populated using AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and potentially Alphabet's Google Bard, which can generate detailed text based on simple user prompts. Many of the websites began publishing this year as the AI tools began to be widely used by the public. In several instances, NewsGuard documented how the chatbots generated falsehoods for published pieces. In April alone, a website called CelebritiesDeaths.com published an article titled, "Biden dead. Harris acting President, address 9 a.m." Another concocted facts about the life and works of an architect as part of a falsified obituary. And a site called TNewsNetwork published an unverified story about the deaths of thousands of soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war, based on a YouTube video. The majority of the sites appear to be content farms -- low-quality websites run by anonymous sources that churn-out posts to bring in advertising. The websites are based all over the world and are published in several languages, including English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai, NewsGuard said in its report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office. From a report: As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It's only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following "Spider-Man: No Way Home," "Top Gun: Maverick," "Jurassic World Dominion" and "Avatar: The Way of Water." "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" opened in theaters on April 5 and generated a towering $204 million in its first five days of release, notching the biggest opening weekend of the year and the second-biggest debut ever for an animated movie. Since then, it has become the highest grossing movie domestically and globally of 2023, as well as the highest-grosser ever for a film based on a video game. Those records are especially encouraging because the last time that Mario and Luigi graced the big screen, in 1993's disastrous live-action "Super Mario Bros," became a legendary example of Hollywood's inability to adapt video games.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That's in part because their craggy walls -- formed from volcanic activity -- provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They're like "stirring rods in the ocean," says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar. But that's an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. "There are a lot of gaps." So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world's oceans, to take a census of seamounts. The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth's gravitational field at that spot. "There's an extra gravitational attraction," Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. From a report: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry's biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life's work. "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. Dr. Hinton's journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech's biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity. "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Dr. Hinton said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Himalayan kingdom confirmed it has been running a bitcoin mining operation as mystery surrounds the scale of its earlier cryptocurrency investments. From a report: Beneath the Himalayas, rivers fed by ancient glaciers supply the tiny kingdom of Bhutan with immense stores of hydroelectricity. The renewable resource has become an economic engine, accounting for 30% of the country's gross domestic product, and fueling the homes of nearly all of its 800,000 residents. But for the past few years, Bhutan's royal government has been quietly devising a new use for these reserves: powering its very own bitcoin mine. Sources familiar with Bhutan's efforts to develop sovereign mining operations told Forbes that discussions have been occurring since 2020, though until this week its government had never disclosed its plans. Bhutan sought to harness the country's hydroelectric plants to power racks of mining machines that solve complex mathematical problems in order to earn bitcoin rewards. Once completed, this would make Bhutan one of the only countries to run a state-owned mine, alongside El Salvador. On Saturday, days after Forbes contacted Bhutanese officials with questions about the mining scheme, a government representative confirmed to local newspaper The Bhutanese that it had begun mining "a few years ago as one of the early entrants when the price of Bitcoin was around USD 5,000." It explained that the earnings go towards subsidizing power and hardware costs. Bhutan's Ministry of Finance did not respond to a list of questions from Forbes about the scope of the enterprise. It's unclear when mining began, where it's located and whether the scheme has turned a profit. (As for the start date, bitcoin was valued at $5,000 in April 2019.) It's also unclear why Bhutan never disclosed the project to its citizens or international partners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pilot program aims to see if AI will cut time that medical staff spend replying to online inquiries. From a report: Behind every physician's medical advice is a wealth of knowledge, but soon, patients across the country might get advice from a different source: artificial intelligence. In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI's "GPT" generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients' online inquiries. UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool. Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. "It gives the human touch that we would," Dr. Millen said. There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JPMorgan said on Monday it will buy most of First Republic Bank's assets after regulators seized the troubled lender at the weekend, marking the third failure of a major U.S. bank in two months. From a report: Under the deal, which came after an auction, JPMorgan will pay $10.6 billion to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) for most of the assets of the San Francisco-based bank, whose failure is the largest since Washington Mutual in 2008. JPMorgan, already the biggest bank in the United States, has also entered into a loss-share agreement with the FDIC on single family, residential and commercial loans it bought, but will not take First Republic Bank's corporate debt or preferred stock. The deal allows for an orderly failure of First Republic and avoids regulators having to insure all the bank's deposits, as they had to do when two others collapsed in March. First Republic disclosed last week that it had suffered more than $100 billion in outflows in the first quarter and was exploring options, increasing stress in the banking sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum:Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material. "It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'" Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure — lignin — was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer... Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post's "Tech Friend" newsletter suggests some "tech fears you can stop worrying about." And it starts by reasuring readers, "You're fine using the WiFi in a coffee shop, hotel or airport."Yes, it is safe," said Chester Wisniewski, a digital security specialist with the firm Sophos. Five or 10 years ago, it wasn't secure to use the shared WiFi in a coffee shop or another place outside your home. But now, most websites and apps scramble whatever you do online. That makes it tough for crooks to snoop on you when you're connected to public WiFi. It's not impossible, but criminals have easier targets. Even Wisniewski, whose job involves sensitive information, said he connected to the WiFi at the airport and hotel on a recent business trip. He plans to use the WiFi at a conference in Las Vegas attended by the world's best computer hackers. Wisniewski generally does not use an extra layer of security called a VPN, although your company might require it. He avoids using WiFi in China. You should be wary of public WiFi if you know you're a target of government surveillance or other snooping. But you are probably not Edward Snowden or Brad Pitt... For nearly all of us and nearly all of the time, you can use public WiFi without stress. The newsletter also suggests we stop worrying about public phone chargers. ("Security experts told me that 'juice jacking' is extremely unlikely... Don't worry about the phone chargers unless you know you're being targeted by criminals or spies.") Beyond that, "Focus your energy on digital security measures that really matter" — things like using strong and unique passwords for online accounts. ("This is a pain. Do it anyway.") And it calls two-factor authentication possibly the single best thing you can do to protect yourself online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'."Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins. "We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person." TimeRepublik is today based in both Lugano, Switzerland and New York, and says it has more than 100,000 users around the world. It makes money by selling the service to companies who then offer it to their staff via their internal websites. The concept of time banking has been around since the 19th Century. Mr Donati says that he wanted to bring it to a younger, and more digitally-savvy audience. The first version of TimeRepublik launched in Switzerland in 2012, according to the BBC, though the site expanded internationally "in the past couple of years." One user told the BBC that with monetary expectations out of the way, "you really get to the core of things and you discover something, I think, that's greater and sort of priceless."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports:With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security. "[B]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project: It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safety vulnerabilities. It's hard to imagine software that's much more critical than sudo and su. This work is being done by a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf with generous support from Amazon Web Services. The work plan is viewable here. The GitHub repository is here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.